Kô et Kô is the story of the journey of two Eskimos in search of the land of sun and warmth. A quick glance through Vieira's illustrations affords us a series of fantastical visions and desolate landscapes. The remoteness, alien expression and forms of these highly schematised and on many occasion biomorphosised visions, permit us to assume their inception to beforeignto the artist’s previous work and therebyhermetic, as Vieira never incorporates them into her painted œuvre. This discourse of visual alienation becomes the most likely explanation as to whyKô et Kô has failed to be integrated into the scholarly literature on Vieira.
However, though seemingly unrelated to her painted works, through the careful examination of references these illustrations engender clear visual links with the works of artists Vieira became acquainted with during these early years in Paris. Vieira met the Surrealist artist Joan Miró in Hayter's Atelier when he joined the workshop in 1931.10 Although only one print by Miró from this period survives to this day, it is actually his painted works which are of particular significance to our examination, particularly his
œuvre from the mid-1920s. The image most easily discernable as owing a debt to Miró is the fifth plate in Vieira’s book entitled La Mer [Pl.41], most likely inspired by Miró's
Seascape (1924) [Pl.42] and Painting (1930) [Pl.43]. From Seascape, one can see Miró’s use of the water, in clear undulating schematic lines against an otherwise saturated 10For a more detailed examination on Hayter'sAtelier 17please refer to section 2.2. of this Chapter.
monochromatic background, discernable in Vieira's paintings of the period. FromPainting, there seems to have been a direct appropriation of the starfish in its skewed monochromatic form; a design never seen again in Vieira's work. There are also strong visual references that strongly recall Miró’s biomorphic orange form in Painting which Vieira's rendition of a black fish with its open threatening mouth and hair extensions, which are similarly positioned on the canvas surface. Furthermore, similarities in form and colour resonate through Vieira’s lean and elongated creature found just beneath the sea- line draws and Miró’s eel-like form.
A less direct visual appropriation of Miró's work from 1920s is visible in Vieira’s first illustration, La Hutte de Kô et Kô [Pl.44] which also references Miró's landscapes, particularly Landscape with Flower (1927) [Pl.45], and Dog barking at the Moon (1926)
[Pl.47].11 The only discernable object in her character’s homeland is an igloo, in an
otherwise deserted landscape of blackened sky and whitened earth. The limited chromatic expression of Vieira's palette is aligned with her ambition to condense the visual vocabulary of her paintedœuvre as she claims: “commencer avec peu de couleurs pour en ajouter au fur et à mésure et non les imposer d'emblée en trop grand nombre et de manière trop affirmé pour ne pas être contrainte dès le départ par leur trop forte présence”.12 The use of a limited palette of saturated colours brings to mind Miró’s
aforementioned landscapes where there is an almost sensorial element in their desolation, echoing Michel Leiris' notion of “la comprénsion du vide” in his description of Miró's work in the journalDocumentsin 1930.13 Although Vieira limits herself to a highly
restricted colour scheme in this first plate, contrary to Miró’s lively use of primary reds
11In all probability Vieira came acrossDog barking at the Moonby 1933 since this painting by 1929 was considered Miró's most famous and most often reproduced painting, as claimed in “Chronologie”, exh. cat.,
Joan Miró: 1917-1934,Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 2004, 342. The year of Vieira’s arrival in Paris it was reproduced in André Breton's, “Surréalisme et la Peinture”, inNouvelle Revue Française, February, 1928 and exhibited alongsideLandscape with Flowerat Galerie Georges Bernheim that same year.
12As quoted in Diane Daval Béran, “Analyse d'Œuvre”, in Weelen, Guy; Jaeger, Jean-François and Daval Béran, Diane (eds.),Monographie, Geneva 1994, 131. All quotes taken from Diane Beran Daval’s work were taken from an interview with the artist in 1991.
and yellows, both artists cover large areas of surface with monochromatic hues, creating deserted, almost lunar landscapes pervaded by emptiness.
Another plate featuring Miró-like traits is Vieira’s Cerf-Volant [Pl.46]. An organic existence is lent to an otherwise inanimate object through the use of an almond shaped eye. While the motif of suspended triangular organisms in flight brings to mind Miró’sThe Hunterand The Tilled Field[Pl.47] (both of 1923-4), the vision itself, of a child and a kite seems to be directly borrowed from Arpad Szenes' portfolio of subjects and motifs. Arpad's work’s, particularly in his series Enfant au Cerf Volant 1929-1936, which lingers between the memory of a real event (a child flying a kite) and the imaginary (his representation of the kite as a living form), inspired Vieira to imbue the theme with a fantastical quality which she then may have incorporated into the storytelling ofKô et Kô. Like Arpad's Cerf Volant print of 1933 [Pl.48], Vieira's kite also possesses the faculty of sight, by way of an almond shaped eye placed upon its triangular form. However, in Vieira's case the print is accompanied by text in which the kite's organic form is explained as follows: “Alors un cerf, qui se promenait entre les arbres de la fôret se transforme en cerf volant et s'envole vers le chateau. Il pecha la petite fille et la mit sur la croupe du cheval de son pére”.14 Vieira's fantastical transformation of a stag [cerf] to a kite [cerf-
volant] visually translates the definition of the word itself, “cerf-volant” as flying-stag. Moving away from the landscape to the actual forms ofKô et Kô,as represented by her book cover, Sur le dos de l'oiseau [Pl.49] and the front cover plate [Pl.50], both Eskimos not only share the same name but seem to be almost physically bound together as a single entity. Vieira may have borrowed this trait in her main characters from Arpad's own series of paintings entitled Le Couple [Pl.51]. Arpad began experimenting with this motif after his marriage to Vieira in 1931. That same year, Arpad completed the print,Le Couple [PL.52] in which he fuses the two interlaced forms to a single outline. Although Vieira's work evades such apparent sentimentality, the quality of this almost symbiotic relationship seems to encompass her characters of Kô et Kô. Arpad, in describing his relationship with Vieira, made the claim: “Nous avons tous les deux la même culture et 14Vieira da Silva,Kô et Kô, plates 7-8.
une même grande sensibilité aux mêmes choses”.15 A similar affinity for her characters may be discerned as Vieira not only grants them the same name, but refers to them throughout the narrative as having a single voice and simultaneous common reactions, causing the reader to begin considering them to be a single entity.
Le Cirqueimmediately strikes the reader as it is unique within Vieira's narrative and painted œuvre in terms of style of execution [Pl.53]. The predominant pale hues of greens, yellows and blues have been supplanted by earthy (brown) tones against a clear monochromatic backdrop, eradicating the horizon line as seen inL'ours et son fils ourson
[Pl.54] andLes phoques[Pl.55], which until then had been characteristic of her landscapes. However, in Le Cirque the complete frontality of her spatial forms and the use of a terracotta colour, renders her composition almost prehistoric in terms of execution, recalling the art found in caves and on stones that was being discovered in Africa and the Americas at that time. Illustrations of these ancient forms of art were available in two art journals of the time - Cahiers d'Art and Documents. One can draw distinctive visual parallels between Vieira's composition of the circus and an illustrated article published in
Documentsin 1930 entitled “Dessins Rupestres du Sud de Rhodesie” [Pl.56].16InLe Cirque
the entire image is centred on a circular arena that creates a clearly spatially enclosed composition. In the archaic vision, similar circular lines can be observed although they are representative of “running waters” whilst humans and animals can be identified on either sides. In Vieira’s work, given her choice of motif these lines are transformed into the spectator’s benches at a circus. The motif itself also proved foreign to Vieira’s œuvre, likely inspired from living in close quarters at Villa Brune with the American engineer- turned-artist Alexander Calder, who throughout the summers of 1930 and 1932 put on shows of his mechanisedCircus[Pl.57] in hisAtelier.17
The decorative plates, which Vieira intended the reader to cut out in order to create paper figurines to accompany the reading of the book [Pl.58], reference the clear 15Anne Philip,L'Eclats de la Lumière: entretiens avec Marie-Helene Vieira da Silva et Arpad Szenes, Paris 1978, 66-7.
16Léo Frobenius, “Dessins Rupestres du Sud de Rhodesie”,Documents, No.4, 1930, 187. 17Alexander Calder,An autobiography with pictures, New York 1967, 281.
spatial grids established by the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres García. This playful activity may also recall Torres García's tendency to transform the schematized forms in his paintings such asConstructif avec figure étrange(1931) [Pl.59] into wooden toys.18In his attempt to create a universal constructive visual language Torres García structured his paintings in a clear grid-like formation, where each figure or form would be contained within its own space. This self-containment is what may have led Vieira to turn this grid-like framework into a child's game. Furthermore, despite a spatial resemblance with the Uruguayan’s painters works, there are also strong schematic influences in her depiction of objects, specifically the frontal view of a ship located in the bottom left corner of her cut-out but otherwise centrally located in Constructif. On the one time Vieira commented on the Uruguayan’s work she remarked in retrospect: “Torres García: une tour blanche, noire, grise, bleu de cobalt, terre rouge, des échelles, des horloges, un monde sévère et gai, un monde où je suis entrée en 1929 et que j’habite toujours”.19
The appropriation of pictorial sources for Vieira’s illustrations from the works of her contemporaries is of a more immediate nature than is exhibited within her painted works of the time, such as the A Nous la Liberté series examined in Chapter II. In the development of a fantastical storyline, Vieira adopted Miróesque biomorphosised forms, her husband's child-inspired printed motifs and Torres García's grid-like surfaces, as further testimony to Vieira's work being in constant dialogue with her surroundings and particularly, with other members of Atelier 17. However, as the following sections examine, the storyline underpinning Kô et Kô, despite its foreign pictorial forms, elicits immediate thematic connection with her petite fille paintings, discussed in Chapter I. In this fashion, the alien quality of these illustrations is constrained to style and motif as Vieira continues developing a storyline which runs parallel to her paintedœuvre.